Open Choice Success Clauses?

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

A number of publishers are now offering "open choice", optional 
open access on payment of a fee in a subscription-based journal 
(Oxford, Blackwell, Springer, Elsevier, PNAS).

With funding agencies either requiring or strongly encouraging 
open access (several of the RCUK bodies, Wellcome Trust, NIH, 
potentially FRPAA, Australian universities, and many other 
policies either in effect or in the works - perhaps librarians 
might want to begin thinking about the economic implications 
should this approach be somewhat successful, creating a new 
revenue stream for publishers.

Some of the publishers (Oxford, Springer) are promising to reduce 
subscription fees based on open choice revenue.  (If there are 
more publishers with such plans, my apologies for any omissions, 
I would appreciate being corrected).

It seems to me to be prudent for libraries to begin looking for 
some kind of "open choice success" clauses in their licenses, 
especially for multi-year agreements.  Perhaps some of the 
publishers have already put such clauses in place?

The idea would be, rather than agreeing to the usual sort of 
pricing over a 3-year period, for example, libraries and 
publishers would have the opportunity to periodicially evaluate 
subscription fees, based on open choice revenue - perhaps, once a 
year.

Without such a clause, libraries - especially those with 
long-term agreements - could end up paying much more than they 
really should, if a significant proportion of the articles ends 
up being paid for through open choice (not to mention if whole 
journals included in a subscription bundle move to open access 
using processing fees).

It seems to me that libraries which coordinate processing fee 
payments for open access, regardless of where the revenues for 
these comes from (funding agencies, departmental funds, library 
budgets, combinations), are in the very best position to 
negotiate subscription reductions for open choice payments - they 
are the ones who will know exactly how much revenue is going to 
which publishers, from their institutions.

For that matter, it is the library which coordinates these fees 
which is in a very good position to say to a publisher - look, 
we've paid for this whole year via subscription, plus x for 
optional processing fees.  Let's just deduct that processing fees 
from next year's subscription costs.

Considering how many publishers have come out with "open choice" 
in the near past, and OA policy developments underway, it might 
be a good idea to look for a standard clause, whether the 
publisher currently has an "open choice" option or not. After 
all, how many publishers had these three years ago?

Could this approach, along with more straightforward payment of 
OA processing fees, be the means for a gradual transition from 
subscription-based payment to open access processing fee 
payments, be one of the keys to a smooth transition from 
subscriptions to open access?

Please note, this is not intended as an endorsement of either the 
open choice or processing fee approaches, only two of a number of 
business models for open access.  Let's not forget that less than 
half of OA journals charge processing fees.

thoughts?

Heather G. Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com